Bela tucked Bobby and Yakov into jump seats behind a washed and brushed Kamaz V8 in a wooden cradle and security straps.
"Not hidden but not seen," Bela said. "It's going to go down like cream. I've done this a hundred times. As soon as we get going, I'll turn on the air conditioner. I guarantee a good time."
Yakov kept one hand on the gun inside his jacket and smiled like a grandpa. Bobby held onto his laptop.
Arkady glanced at Bela's CDs. "Your Tom Jones collection?"
"It's a long drive."
Bobby rallied enough to say, "Renko, you remind me of a dog I once had. With one eye, three legs, no tail. Answered to the name Lucky. That's you. You never know when to stop."
"Probably not." Arkady wasn't sure it was a compliment.
"Ozhogin is really coming?"
"I think so."
Yakov nodded. Wonderful, Arkady thought, the paranoids agree.
Bobby said, "One thing, Renko. Tell me you're staying because you know who killed Pasha. Tell me you're close."
Arkady let his fingers lie: he held his thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart and slid the van door shut.
"Where are you?" Zurin demanded. "I expected you here in this office an hour ago."
"I'm sorry. That flight was overbooked," Arkady said.
"To Moscow?"
"Yes."
"Where are you right now? I hear shouts."
"On the plane." Arkady was in Campbell 's dormitory room. The professor himself was curled up in the bottom of the shower stall, and a tape of a soccer game between Liverpool and Arsenal was on the television.
"What flight number?" the prosecutor asked. "When are you landing in Moscow?"
"Can Colonel Ozhogin meet me?"
"No."
"How do you know? You haven't asked him."
"I'm sure he's busy. When are you landing?"
"They're telling us to turn off our mobile phones."
"How could you-"
Arkady ended the call. That was the problem with long leashes, he thought. You couldn't tell whether the dog was at the other end or not.
He hoped he had done one thing right and gotten Bobby and Yakov safely out of Chernobyl. It wasn't like rescuing babes from a fire, but Arkady was willing to celebrate small accomplishments. Yakov's expression at the end might have been the ghost of a smile.
He cleared Campbell's desk enough to write a list of what he knew about Timofeyev: the pivotal relationship with Pasha lvanov, their paired careers, their similar poor health and poisoning, the letter that Timofeyev had mentioned at Pasha's charity party, the discovery of Timofeyev's body in the Zone by what Militia Officer Karel Katamay had reported as a local squatter. Everything parallel to Ivanov except his death; that was different. The only person as ill as they were, in the same extraordinary fashion, was Karel Katamay. Katamay was the key, and he was a wraith in the woods. Or hidden in Pripyat near the theater, at least during the day, while the Woropay brothers were on duty.
Arkady's task was to avoid Ozhogin. The colonel would consider him the most likely lead to Bobby, and Arkady suspected that he enjoyed gathering information. Arkady had taken the precaution of hiding his motorbike in back of a woodpile behind the dormitory. Of course, Ozhogin's arrival might be a figment of Arkady's imagination, and the urgency in Zurin's commands merely revealed excitement at having Arkady near.
In the meantime, Arkady hydrated the wilted Campbell with a glass of water and a lukewarm shower; any decent guest would have.
Victor called. "You were right about the travel office. Anton and Galina picked up tickets for Morocco."
"For when?" Arkady felt apologetic: he had completely forgotten about Anton. He paced, negotiating empty bottles on the floor. On the television Liverpool still played Arsenal.
"Two days. I caught the travel agent on the way down and bought her a coffee."
"You chatted up the agent?" The newly attired Victor must be much less frightening than the old one, Arkady thought.
"I chatted up an agent. Did you know that it's often cheaper for two people to travel than one?"
"You're getting very sophisticated."
"But there's more to it than that. We were having our coffees, the travel agent and I, when Anton and Galina came out of the building. See, after the agent. So, they must have gone into the dentist's office. That just struck me as odd. Where was the dentist?"
"Dr. Levinson?" No inspiration in Liverpool. Arkady switched to England versus Holland. From the 1990s. A classic.
"That's right. There was a phone number on her office sign. I called it and a voice said she was going on a month's vacation starting tomorrow. It was a sweet voice, but not a well-educated voice, and my bet is it was our lovely Galina. I worry about the dentist."
"Why?"
"You know where Anton went from there? A bank. I ask you, since when does Anton Obodovsky use a legitimate bank? He launders money or he buys diamonds. He does not stand in line like a normal person at an ordinary bank. Something is going on."
"What?"
"I don't know. Whatever it is, I have a feeling that when he and Galina take off to Morocco they're not going to leave any loose ends behind. If so, I am very disappointed in Galina."
"Where is Anton now?" It was the end of the soccer match. Arkady could tell because the British fans were ripping out grandstand railings and hurling them at police.
"The last I saw, he and Galina were tearing along the river in a new Porsche convertible. Real lovebirds."
Klaxon wailing, a bus pulled onto the field and disgorged Dutch police with helmets and shields.
Victor said, "By the way, you may be right about Alex Gerasimov. He either fell or jumped off a four-story building a week after his father blew his head off. But the son lived. Is he crazy or strong?"
"Good question."
"Where's Bobby?" Victor asked. "His phones off. What's going on up there? Do I hear soccer?"
Only Victor would rightly interpret a riot as a soccer match, Arkady thought.
"Kind of. Get a home number for the dentist, just to hear her voice. And if Zurin calls…"
"Yes?"
"You haven't talked to me in weeks."
"I wish."
Arkady closed the mobile phone and rewound the video to the point where police buses rolled into view. The phone rang. The caller ID showed a local number.
"Arkady?" It was Eva.
There was a pause while British fans threw seat cushions, bottles, coins.
"Eva, I think I misunderstood your relationship with Alex."
"Arkady…"
Thugs, stripped to Union Jack tattoos, dragged down local fans and stomped them with boots.
Eva said, "Alex said you went to Moscow."
"So?"
Once down, a victim could be kicked in any number of vital spots. Some hooligans, British or Russian, were virtuosos with steel-toed boots. Meanwhile, the police ducked from the rain of hard objects.
"I thought you'd left."
"You were wrong."
A crowd surged onto the field, broke through the police line and rocked a bus.
"I hear shouts. Where are you, Arkady?"
"I can't tell you."
"You don't trust me?"
He let the question stand. The bus driver had locked the doors but trapped himself inside. The bus windows burst into crystal.
Eva asked, "What can I do?"
Rioters put their shoulders to the bus and rocked it from side to side. The lights were on. Running back and forth, the driver looked like a moth in a swinging lamp.
"If you want to help," Arkady said, "you can tell me what Alex does in Moscow in his off-time. You're close to him."
"Is that what you want to talk about?"
"Can you help or not? What does a radioecologist do in Moscow to earn money?"
Police formed a wedge in an effort to rescue the bus. However, a number of hooligans had appropriated helmets and batons and put up a stiff resistance. One policeman, taken hostage, spun comically between blows.
"Can you help or not?" Arkady repeated.
Oopah! The bus went over with a cheer. Figures swarmed it, kicking in the windshield and dragging the driver out.
"Please don't," she said.
"Can you help or not?"
Too late, a water cannon arrived to clear the field. As the jet drove the crowd back, the stampede in the exits gained the strength of desperation. A second wave of bodies rushed the camera and sucked it under.
"No? Too bad." Arkady ended the call.
The next images were taped later, of police picking over clothes on the field and the empty stands, photographing the scene, maneuvering a tractor crane to lift the toppled bus back on its wheels. An ambulance stood by in case anyone was underneath. There was a special, mutual pain to the conversation, he thought. Hurting her, of course. Also-by ending the call and demonstrating who was in control-denying himself the chance to listen. This way he could enjoy the deep satisfaction of twisting the knife in two people at the same time. It was the sort of pain a man could suck on forever. The bus lurched onto its wheels. No bodies. The final shot was of the score: 0-0. As if nothing had happened at all.
Great minds compartmentalized. Arkady put on Vanko's tape and fast-forwarded, then rewound. The question, he decided, was why the camera had found Bobby, among all the Hasidim. On repeated viewings, it was a little more obvious, and not as a matter of editing. If Vanko had edited, he would have excised the clumsy shot of his run to the tomb. And the virtual close-up of Bobby at the prayer was not hidden well enough. Toward the end of the tape, at the leave-taking of the buses, Arkady could almost feel the camera search for Bobby. He went frame by frame until he saw a reflection in the bus's folded glass door of Vanko handing out business cards. If Vanko hadn't been taping, who had? When had the handover taken place? Before the Kaddish? Or even earlier, before the visit to the tomb?
Arkady heard a car brake hard in the dormitory parking lot and bodies rush into the downstairs hall. A rapid conversation included the bewildered tones of the housekeeper. A moment later, heavy feet ran up the stairs and stopped next door, at the room Arkady had occupied. A key jiggled and they were in. It sounded like they tossed the mattress and drawers, then collected again in the hall.
Arkady slid a chain bolt into the doorplate a moment before someone rapped on the other side.
"Renko? Renko, if you're in there, open up." It was Ozhogin, which gave Arkady the perverse satisfaction of knowing he had been right. At the same time, the door seemed flimsy. Arkady moved back. He heard the housekeeper waddle up the hall and mention the Scotsman, maybe adding a gesture of drinking. She scratched the door and called Campbell's name. A fist knocked less politely.
"Renko," Ozhogin said, "you should have filled out the form. We would have found some kind of job for you. Now it's come to this."
The housekeeper tried the wrong key and apologized. A key was a formality; Arkady knew how simple it was to pop the lock. Anyway, she had the key; it was only a matter of finding her glasses.
"Here we are," she said.
Arkady became aware of someone behind him. Campbell had wandered in from the bathroom in his undershirt and drawers, wet as a duck. The professor punched Vanko's tape out of the machine, replaced it with one marked Liverpool-Chelsea and raised the volume. On his way back to the bathroom, he picked up a bottle that was not completely empty. When the door suddenly opened the length of the chain he paused to shout through the space, "Shut yer fookin' gobs!"
Arkady didn't know how well Ozhogin spoke English but he seemed to get the message. There was a long moment while the colonel decided whether to break in on the drunken Scot. The moment passed. Arkady heard Ozhogin and his men retreat down the hall, confer, then move with dispatch down the stairs and out to their car. Doors slammed and they drove away.
Hours slipped around the window shade. Arkady knew he should sleep; he also knew that as soon as he closed his eyes he would be back on the ground outside Eva's cabin.
Arkady called the children's shelter and asked for Zhenya. Olga Andreevna came on the line. "Are you finally here in Moscow?" she asked.
"No."
"You're impossible. But at least you called him this time, and that's an improvement. His group is in music class now, although Zhenya doesn't actually sing. Wait."
Arkady sat with the phone for ten minutes.
The director came back on and said, "Here he is." Zhenya, naturally, said nothing.
"Do you like music?" Arkady asked. "Any special group? Have you been playing chess? Eating well?" Arkady remembered films of pioneers of flight, the unsuccessful ones with man-made wings who ran and flapped, ran and flapped, and never got off the ground. That was like trying to talk to Zhenya.
"My case here is winding up soon. I'll be back, and if you like, we can go to a soccer game. Or Gorky Park." If Arkady had not met Zhenya, he would have no good reason to believe the boy actually existed. Just for a test, he said, "Baba Yaga has a wolf."
There was a perceptible quickening of the breath on the other end.
"The wolf lives in a red forest with his wife, a human who wants to escape. He doesn't know whether he wants to eat her or keep her, but he does know he'll eat anyone who tries to help her. In fact, the forest is littered with the bones of those who have tried and failed. I wanted your advice on whether I should try. What do you think? Take your time. Consider every possibility, like a chess game. When you know, call me. In the meantime, be good."
He hung up.
Liverpool wore red uniforms, Chelsea white. Zurin called and Arkady didn't answer. Something was right in front of him, dangling and shining like a mirror ball, but every time he reached out, it disappeared. Or skipped along like that Icelandic sprite you could see only from the corner of your eye.
Vanko had said Alex made lots of money. In the belly of the beast, Alex had said. Exactly what beast? Arkady wondered.
Arkady opened his file. On the NoviRus employment application were an Internet site, e-mail address, phone and fax numbers.
Arkady called the phone number, and a woman's musical voice said, "Welcome to NoviRus. How may I direct your call?"
"Interpreting and translation."
"Legal, international or security?"
"Security." He never would have guessed.
"Hold, please."
Arkady held until a brusque male voice answered, "Security."
"I'm calling Alex Gerasimov."
A pause to punch in the name. "You want the accident section."
"That's right."
"Hold."
A Liverpool forward scored on a breakaway, the gift of a bad pass that left the Chelsea goalie naked. Soccer had been Arkady's sport, and goalie had been his position. A goalie's life balanced between anxiety and agony. Once in a while, though, there was the unexpected, undeserved save.
"Accident." A second male voice was not nearly so military.
"Alex Gerasimov?"
"No. He's not on duty for another two weeks."
"Doing interpreting and translation?"
"That's right."
"For the accident section?"
"Yes."
"He was going to explain everything to me."
"Sorry, Alex is not here. I'm Yegor."
A good sign; a man who offered his name invited conversation.
"I apologize for bothering you, Yegor, but Alex was going to tell me about the job."
Arkady heard a rustle like a newspaper being put down.
"You're interested?"
"Very."
"You talked to the people in Employment?"
"Yes, but you know how it is with them, they never give you an honest picture. Alex was going to."
"I can do that."
Yegor explained that NoviRus offered physical security to Russian and foreign clients in the usual form of bodyguards and cars. For foreign clients, they provided standby interpreters who could go to the scene of a traffic accident or an incident involving police or any emergency where their presence could alleviate a dangerous or costly misunderstanding, often with prostitutes, for which there was a discretionary fund. Interpreters were expected to be university-educated, well dressed and fluent in two foreign languages. They worked a twenty-four-hour shift every three days and were paid a handsome ten dollars an hour, perfect for part-time work. What the people in Employment didn't tell applicants was that the twenty-four-hour shift was spent either racing around Moscow, from one scene of confusion to the next, or going nowhere at all, which meant a day and a night in a basement room not much larger than a closet, with three cots, a coatrack and a minibar. The interpreters had been promised real quarters, but they were still stuck like an afterthought behind Surveillance, which, by virtue of all the screens it monitored, had a quarter of the floor.
"Alex made it sound better than that," Arkady said.
"Alex has the run of the place. He's been here awhile. He knows everyone, and he's in and out of everywhere."
"Ten dollars an hour?" Arkady figured this was about five times what a senior investigator made. "That covers a lot of sins. Were you on duty the day Pasha Ivanov died?"
"No."
"But Alex was, wasn't he?"
"Yeah. Who did you say you were?"
Arkady hung up. The game was getting interesting. With a minute to go, Chelsea was a man down but pressing for a tie and getting corner kick after corner kick to try for a header. The goalie tugged on his gloves and stationed himself one long diagonal step in front of the goalmouth. Campbell had come out of the bathroom to watch. Red and white uniforms elbowed for position as the ball rose from the corner and curled toward the goal. Players milled, thrust themselves up by their elbows and achingly stretched. The goalie committed, diving into the mass, hands high to intercept. Moving swiftly for a drunk, the professor crossed to the videotape and pressed Stop. The players hung in midair.
"I can't see it. I won't watch it one more time. It's agony aforesaid, the turning of the thumbscrews, the inevitable lop. They can freeze for fookin' eternity for all I care. Who cares? Do y'know what happens? Do y'know?" Exhausted, Campbell dropped on his bed and passed out.
No, Arkady thought, he didn't know. By now Bobby Hoffman could be halfway to Cyprus or Malta. Anton was either menacing someone or buying matching luggage with Galina. It was even getting dark enough for Arkady to stir.
Arkady's mobile phone rang. Eva. He was about to answer when an image of her and Alex came flooding back. The sight of Eva pressed against the bureau. The sound of perfume bottles rolling to the floor. Arkady remembered her eyes, the look of a drowning woman who embraces the whirlpool. He still couldn't answer.
Another call. From Bela. Arkady took this one because he could use good news, but Bela said, "We're at the power station, at the sarcophagus. We were headed to the checkpoint when the fat one changed his mind."
"Why did you go to the power station? Why did you agree?"
Bela's voice got small. "He offered so much money."
Arkady covered the first few kilometers on dirt roads through black villages to see whether anyone was following him before taking the motorcycle onto the highway. Ozhogin would focus on the route south to Kiev, not to the center of the Zone. There was no avoiding the checkpoint outside the power station, but Arkady was waved through. He had become a familiar figure, the eccentric investigator who haunted Pripyat. Usually he rode by the station entrance. This time, he killed his headlight and swung in. In the twilight were faint indications of towers and high-tension wires. The power station's main office was a four-story building as white as a ghost. Arkady remembered that the complex had been designed for a total of eight reactors, the largest in the world. A digital clock over the main door read 20:48.
A Uralmoto motorcycle was not a quiet machine, and Arkady half expected to see a flashlight's beam or hear the challenge of a guard. Buses he saw, but no cars or vans. He crossed the parking lot to a row of what might have been laboratories and saw enough radiation posters and advisory signs to persuade him to turn on his headlight again. He U-turned at a dead end of dump bins overflowing with bags marked toxic waste, ignored a sign that said authorized personnel ONLY, as any Russian would anywhere, and followed a wire fence crowned with razor wire. More fences and wire led him right and left up to a sign that said do not enter-report TO GUARD BEFORE PROCEEDING-ARE YOU WEARING YOUR RADIATION pin? Arkady coasted through and found a service road where Bela's van was parked at a gate, not a simple counterweighted pole but a steel gate that was rolled shut. A sign in English said stop. Bela was in the van. Bobby Hoffman and Yakov stood in the middle of the road facing a security wall decked with shiny coils of wire. Each man wore a yarmulke and a tasseled shawl. Arkady couldn't make out what they were saying, though they rocked back and forth to its rhythm.
Beyond the wall was another wire-draped wall and, fifty meters farther on, the sarcophagus, as stained and massive as a windowless cathedral. Dim security lamps glowed here and there. A crane and a chimney stack towered over the sarcophagus, but compared to it, they were insignificant. Connected to the sarcophagus was the more presentable Reactor Two, which was invisible. The sarcophagus was apart, alone, alive.
Bela crept out of the van. "This is as close as we could get."
Arkady didn't need to use his dosimeter; he felt his hair rise.
"It's close enough. Why are you here?"
"The fat one insisted."
"The old guy didn't try to talk him out of it?"
"Yakov? He seemed to expect it. They just waited until dark so it was safer. They seem to have a lot of names. You didn't tell me they were on the run."
"Does it matter?"
"It drives up the price."
Arkady looked around. "Where are the guards?"
Bela pointed to a pair of legs sticking out from the shadow of the gate. "Just a watchman. I gave him some vodka."
"You're always prepared."
"I am."
It was the night shift, Arkady thought. There were no office or construction workers. A skeleton crew could maintain the three reactors that were shut down, and no one entered the sarcophagus. On the power grid, the Chernobyl station was a black hole, a repository of spent fuel in a bankrupt country. How many guards would there be?
The chanting wasn't loud enough to carry far. Bobby's voice was whispery. Yakov's was deep and worn, and Arkady recognized the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Their voices overlapped, separated, joined again.
"How long have they been doing this?"
"Half an hour, at least. When I called you."
"The rest of the time, what did you do all day?"
"Drove into the woods. I found them a hill with nice mobile-phone reception. The fat one called and arranged things."
"What things?"
"Belarus is just a few kilometers north. Your friends have got visas and a car waiting. They've got every move figured out."
"Like a game of chess."
"Exactly like chess."
Except if they were doing it for Pasha, it was too late, Arkady thought. Arkady was aware of having been manipulated by Bobby and Yakov, but he didn't feel angry. They were escape artists, what else would they do?
"But they let you call me?"
"Yakov suggested it."
So they should have been on the run to Minsk, gateway to the world, instead of standing outside the corrupted shell of a nuclear disaster, rocking back and forth like human metronomes and intoning the same verses over and over, "Ose sholom himromov hu yaase sholom." When they finished the prayer, they simply began again. Arkady told himself he should have known this was coming. Would Bobby have come all this way to repeat his failure? Wasn't this the logical, inevitable outcome, whether Bobby knew it consciously or not? Or was Yakov, like a black angel, forcibly keeping Bobby out of hell?
Arkady moved into their line of vision. Each step brought the sarcophagus closer, too, as if it had been waiting for the right hour to leap the wall, a hard sight to face without a prayer. Yakov acknowledged Arkady with the briefest nod, to say not to worry, that he and Bobby were fine. Bobby clutched a list of names that Arkady could see because of a rising moon that spilled over the station yard. Maybe Bobby and Yakov had planned well and had some luck, but every minute spent at the power plant was a chance taken, and the list looked long. Arkady remembered Eva saying that a complete list would reach the moon. The thought of his cold-blooded rejection of her made him wince. It occurred to him that when she needed him most he had abandoned her, and that he had made an irretrievable mistake.